Superintendent aims to create social media task force

Tuesday

Jan 14, 2014 at 2:00 AM

EXETER — SAU 16 Superintendent Michael Morgan has approached other Seacoast superintendents about the idea of creating a task force to address the dangers that social media can pose to middle and high school students.

Jeff McMenemy

EXETER — SAU 16 Superintendent Michael Morgan has approached other Seacoast superintendents about the idea of creating a task force to address the dangers that social media can pose to middle and high school students.

Morgan said he wants students to be able to use social media responsibly and to understand that anything they put online stays there forever.

Morgan talked to superintendents from Hampton, Portsmouth, Sanborn Regional, Newmarket and Epping last week to share his concerns about students behaving badly and then posting photos or videos of their actions online.

"We talked about the real need to make this a collaborative effort," Morgan said during the Exeter Cooperative School Board meeting Thursday at Exeter High School. "This is not just an Exeter issue."

Morgan's comments came a couple of days after he expressed his concerns during a subcommittee meeting after he saw photos of Exeter High School kids drinking and smoking marijuana online that he called "pretty upsetting."

He believes the pictures were on a Web site that had something to do with "Sexeter," the term that was used when Exeter High School made statewide news after a former principal kicked 19 students out of a school dance in February 2009 for grinding, or dancing while their bodies make contact in a sexually suggestive manner.

Morgan also showed subcommittee members a "20-20" report about the 2012 rape of a drunk 16-year-old girl by two football players at a high school party in Steubenville, Ohio.

Ma'lik Richmond, then 16, and Trent Mays, 17, were both found delinquent — the juvenile court equivalent of guilty — of the digital penetration of the drunk girl at an alcohol-fueled party in Steubenville on the night of Aug. 11, 2012, as other teenagers watched, and in some cases took pictures and videos that were posted online.

During Thursday night's meeting, Cooperative School Board member Mark Portu said students have to understand how much information they're divulging to the world when they go online.

"It is not just a shout-out to your friends, it's not just this is the party we went to and so on," Portu said. "We need as the education community (to make sure) that they understand the data that they're making available about themselves."

Posting about your activities online let's people know "where I'm standing, where I'm going, where I have been, what I am doing, what I have looked at on the Internet, what I like to do."

He cautioned that there are large companies "that spends billions of dollars to make sure that anything that is put out on the net that is tied to somebody who may one day become a consumer, that it's kept and kept forever, and never lost and backed up repeatedly."

Fellow board member Darrell Chichester stressed while it's important to warn students about posting online, it's equally as important to warn them about the kind of risky behavior they're exposing themselves to.

"What we're dealing with here is not just the fact that people are showing themselves doing these things, but they're dong these things," Chichester said at Thursday's meeting. "I think it's important to keep that in mind. Make it clear that our message is not 'don't post yourself doing these things,' but let's address some of this behavior."

Morgan said after the meeting that the Southeast Superintendent's Association that he spoke to "seemed receptive" about the idea of forming a task force.

"It's something we have to talk more about," Morgan said.

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